11. An Impenetrable Wall of Savagery
11. AN IMPENETRABLE WALL OF SAVAGERY
ELOWYN
The darkness, as all-consuming as it had appeared, fell away the moment I was through the doorway as if it had been merely a wrapper hiding … well, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking at, only that I very much fucking wished I hadn’t walked through this damned door. Let any of the eager females come through first, see if they’d survive it.
I’d entered a space so unlike any I’d ever encountered that I instantly understood the test the queen had devised for me wasn’t like any of the others. It couldn’t be. This was … something else , when all the queen ever seemed to show her courtiers was what they expected to see: a cutthroat, vicious queen and the expression of her every twisted, ruthless desire.
My surroundings were the exact opposite of what I’d expected: everything was so bright I couldn’t make out walls, or even lines to lend exact shape to things. All I could discern—when I almost wished I couldn’t—was a pulsing, writhing, hungry mass of what I guessed were animals. Beasts, more likely. Monsters , really.
I suspected the queen had finally found another loophole through the protections of the trials’ magic. My chest clenched with the sudden certainty that I’d never see Rush again—or Saffron or Xeno or Pru or Reed or any of the others—Roan, I wanted to see the dwarf again. I’d never free the dragons as I’d promised. I’d abandon the goblins and so many other magical creatures to the queen’s cruel dominion forever.
Worse even than all of that, I wouldn’t live to see recognition on Rush’s face again. He wouldn’t look at me and see his mate. My last memory of him would be of how he’d been too ashamed to meet my stare, how he’d thought me little different from the Natanias and Malinas, who saw him barely as more than a stepping stone, a means to their ends—their satisfaction.
This entire test appeared designed to eat me alive.
Quite literally.
Too fucking literally.
The animals stretched, reaching for me, held back by … something—only just for now, I was sure.
My gut squeezed as a hissing and chittering reminiscent of the umbracs erupted all at once, merging with snarls and growls, the gnashing and snapping of teeth, and low, menacing grumbles so vicious they alone set the hair across my arms on end.
And that was before the first of the bellows arrived to steal away my breath, leaving me to pull in a shaky, insufficient inhale.
As if the scene were illuminated by a hundred suns, in the brightness I could scarcely make out the claws and teeth, the tentacles and arms, the lashing tails and whipping wings. Regardless, they lunged at me, fighting with each other to reach their prize first.
I stumbled backward, forgetting too many of Zako’s lessons. His lilting voice, usually a comfort or encouragement, was silent.
A growl roared behind me so loud, so foul, that my eyes watered. Clutching my dagger, I whirled to face this new threat, but when I turned, pulsing, grabbing predators pressed closer from above and below too. I didn’t actually seem to be standing on anything beyond that too-bright, too-stark light that blinded me to details. This was possibly a blessing. I had no doubt, I was in mortal danger. As bad as things were, I expected they were worse than they seemed.
The beasts snapped at me from all directions. My blade was woefully insufficient, but?—
But. I could handle this. I could figure it out. This was what I’d trained for.
I snorted at the emptiness of my own pep-talk. This was certainly not what I’d trained for.
I had, however, trained to hone every strength at my disposal. And I had learned not to give up. Not ever.
Hadn’t I grown up amid dragons? Dragons , for fuck’s sake. There was no creature in this world as powerful as a dragon.
Something terrible chose that moment to unleash a roar so potent I felt my teeth, eyeballs, and bones rattle. I swallowed, trying to lean back into the bravado I’d been building … but…
…no one was coming into this … place … wherever the dragonfire I was, to save me.
You’ve got this, Elowyn. Of course you fucking do. You always do.
Teeth snapped so close to my ear that I shrieked, scampered forward, and felt claws rake my arm from the front.
“ Fuck ,” I hissed at the sting while ignoring my instinct to examine the cuts.
I already knew: they were deep gashes that would become a real problem if I didn’t get out of here soon.
Another slash raked across my skirts, tearing them and slicing into my calf.
I sucked in a sharp wheeze, my eyes watering from the pain. Sticky gore dripped down my arm and leg. I was bleeding freely. In the middle of a swarm of monsters, dammit . They probably freaking loved the scent of fresh blood.
Surely enough, a frenetic yipping ensued.
A deep rumble of communal snarling and whimpering, yearning.
I felt more than saw more monsters lunge for me.
Blade first, I ducked low and spun. My dagger connected with flesh while I felt the rushing air of a swipe precisely where my face had been moments before.
I cut through tissue, a satisfying whine telling me I’d caused real damage.
Squinting out at the others, I couldn’t make out a damn thing beyond a mass of too-sharp, too-deadly appendages, heads, and their teeth crowding me.
It was too bright! Unbearably so. By scalding sunshine, how was I supposed to see anything?
But of course, that was the point. The queen had stacked every odd in her favor so I wouldn’t emerge from this one. She’d gone for overkill so there’d be no chance of my survival.
Whatever loophole in the protective magic she’d discovered, she was seizing the shit out of the opportunity.
Perhaps it was mere instinct, but I felt the momentum of a paw before it connected. I shot to standing, jumping as I moved—straight into a mass of gelatinous tentacles. They wove across my chest in a tight band, yanking me down, while the blur of furry paw, larger than my head, batted at empty space.
The tentacles suctioned onto my bare skin, hooking barbs into me much as the umbracs had. Before it could get any worse, and without bracing myself for the inevitable sting, I hacked at a couple of the tentacles. A high-pitched screech swallowed my pained groan, and I wrenched free of their grip.
Blindly, I sliced in a wide arc around me, cutting a few of my attackers, but scarcely pushing any of them back. They weren’t afraid of the damage I might cause them. And why should they be, when I was so outnumbered and outmatched it was as if I were back in the Gladius Probatio, facing off with the fifty-four other contestants all at once?
Another ruthlessly sharp claw or tooth or barb cut through the open wound on my calf, and I stumbled to one knee. Though nothing appeared to support my weight, when I landed it was onto an invisible surface that cracked painfully against my kneecap.
Again, thanks to those instincts I’d honed over endless hours, first of Zako’s training and later my own, I yanked my head back a split second before what sounded like a whip but was probably a tail or tentacle or some other killer-beast part cracked through the space I’d only just occupied.
Overwhelmed, overcome, and with absolutely nowhere to retreat to, I screamed out my frustration at the top of my lungs while I struck with both arms at whatever attacked. There wasn’t so much as a single square foot of safe space—and a seemingly endless onslaught of monsters with a taste for Elowyn meat.
I grabbed and snapped limbs, sliced and diced whatever reached for me. But for every good blow I landed, they hit me with three, four, five times as many. I felt slick with blood, more of me burning with cuts than not.
Just as discouraging, the light had only grown stronger. My eyes watered from the strain of staring into it, trying to anticipate any movement that would help me prevent yet one more cut. They smarted too from the sweat that dripped into my eyes.
By sunshine, every muscle burned. Every cut throbbed and pulled.
Some surge of force made the light pulse even brighter, the monsters lunging for me all at once.
I had to close my eyes.
Instantly, my heart sounded louder still. The creatures nearer, I heard the drip of heavy saliva a moment before it plopped onto the crown of my head to slide down the back of it.
I was out of options.
In seconds, I’d also be out of time.
However she’d managed it, the queen had found the way to murder me while I competed in the trials.
In a desperate attempt to protect my head and vital organs, I curled in on myself, clutching the blade to my chest. Useless. A dagger was no defense against this. A dozen daggers would have been little better. I would need an army to walk back out of here alive, assuming I could even find the doorway again.
Blows rained down on me from all directions. Though my thighs were pulled tight to my chest, something sharp raked along the side of my abdomen, cutting through my bodice like it was soft cheese and opening my flesh beneath it.
A devastated breath left me, significant enough that I heard it above the chaos beyond me.
The queen had found the way to infiltrate the light with her darkness.
My thoughts were scattered, I could tell. The attacks and pain were coming from too many places at once. I couldn’t focus.
But there was one last thing to try. One last chance to survive. I had to do it.
As I’d done in the Sorumbra when we’d faced the umbracs, I sought the aid of the land.
Only here, wherever this was … apparently there was no land.
Fuck me.
Apparently, nothing existed here beyond a corrupted light and many beasts.
Another claw or something cleaved open the length of my right thigh, pulling away what little focus I’d managed to gather.
It took the swat of a gigantic paw to the back of my neck to startle me back to the tenuous connection I had with the Mirror World.
My mother was the rightful heir to King Erasmus, I entreated the land, and I was her rightful heir, etcetera. No way was I getting more of my genealogical tree out right now. My very thoughts stuttered beneath the growling proximity of my impending death.
Either the Mirror World recognized me as its rightful heir or it didn’t.
Able to only pull in shallow breaths around the barrage of slams and slices against my body, I kept my eyes clenched shut. Now, it was mostly so my courage wouldn’t waver. Better not to try to make sense of the monster parts emerging from the concealing brightness .
“Please,” I muttered, not sure whom exactly I was begging.
I fought to find stillness, found absolutely none, and flung my awareness out toward the land another time. Still, I didn’t find it. The faith I’d allowed myself without my notice withered.
By dragonfire, where even was I? I felt like I was inside the pit of devouring that had opened in the coliseum, only I’d been sucked down into it with every damned predator in the Mirror World.
“Come on!” I snarled when all I sensed was my death closing in.
No land.
No magic.
No help.
So I sought to bypass the connection to the land’s power and wield magic on my own. Grunting, I pictured a glow pushing up and out through my skin.
All I managed was to experience exactly how many places I was cut open. As if I were at the edge of a raging storm, claws, teeth, barbed tentacles, and tails pummeled me. Surely by now there was no intact flesh left to shred. I bled in so many places that blood slunk everywhere along my skin, feeling as if ants were crawling across me.
Once more—one final time—I reached for that tenuous connection to the magic of this world. I’d touched it before. I knew what it felt like.
I found no hint of it in this horrible place so bright it was leached of all goodness .
Fucking fine . If the queen wanted me dead so badly, fine. Take me already and be done with it, you asshole bitch!
More snarls, growls, and chomps. More rending flesh. More blows, jostling me in every direction except away from here. Anywhere else would have been good. Absolutely anywhere else. I would have even done a celebratory jig to suddenly find myself back in the damn Sorumbra, in the midst of a horde of hissing, chittering umbracs with all those roving, predatory eyes.
The strikes passed the point of unbearable to truly insurmountable, to several too fucking many. I expected my mind to go blank. Maybe in that blankness I’d see Zako again, reaching for me from the Etherlands. Or maybe, by some miracle, the land’s magic would reach for me from the impossible, just as it had in the arena, bringing me back from the very brink of death.
Instead, the faces of every person and creature I’d learned to love over my short lifetime filled the space behind my eyes, where even closed the light seared through the thin skin of my eyelids. Hazy as their visages were, I saw Rush and Xeno and Saffron. And then Zako and Pru and Reed. Roan and Finnian. Rush, again and again, smiling at me as if I were the best thing he’d ever seen. Rush kissing me, filling my sight as his face hovered above mine. Him inside me, our bodies heated and flush. My mate. My friends. Then the sapphire-blue dragon from the throne room. And next the enormous black dragon from the Wilds .
I wasn’t through with any of them, nor with this life.
But it appeared I wasn’t getting a say in when my end came.
Now . It was coming now.
A set of claws dragged along the length of my back, gouging so deep I wondered foggily if they could reach through my back into my heart.
Now .
Tentacles weaving into what was left of the coronet the she-goblin had braided, tugging my head to the left, exposing my throat. Teeth sinking in, breaking me open. Sucking my blood.
Now .
The tatters of my dress yanked free from the blood that stuck it to my hips. Jaws clamping around my right thigh and ripping out a chunk.
Now .
My death was mere breaths away.
So I stopped even thinking about the land’s magic, about my magic, whatever it might have been able to be, and allowed myself to simply imagine my lover, my friends, the man I wished had actually been my father as he’d claimed, so I’d have been spared all of this.
What was the point of my life? It had all been so … useless.
I was going to die, and my mate would possibly never remember who I was after I was gone.
The dragons would continue to be butchered by the queen .
The goblins would keep suffering at her hands.
So freaking many fae would suffer and suffer and suffer amid the shadows she’d woven. She gripped the Mirror World so tightly she was suffocating any remaining light that had survived.
I’d never see where the map branded on my skin led. Nor would I see the puckered kiss of death scar at my heart fade beneath the glimmer of the handprint of my lover.
I’d fail as the first person marked scaled since King Erasmus’ extermination of the dragons.
I’d fail—in spectacular fashion—the destiny the sapphire dragon had told me in such a wise, ancient voice that I possessed.
I was failing everyone before I’d had a proper chance to try.
Worst of all, I was failing myself.
I no longer struggled. I hurt every-fucking-where. To end the pain, I attempted to unfurl my body to bring on my death sooner. But I was too shredded and disassembled to uncurl myself at all. All I managed to do was crane up my head, expose the front of my throat, and welcome the next bludgeon.
Everything was fading.
I could hardly hear the snarls anymore either. Like the faces I longed to hold on to, they faded. Even the bright light was ebbing, darkness pressing in on me, and for the first time since meeting the queen I welcomed it. I wanted it. I gave myself over to it completely.
And when a beast finally materialized in front of me—massive haunches above my head, paws the size of saucers, claws like knives, saliva dripping from fangs the size of my fingers—I did something that made no sense.
If I was anything, I was well and surely beyond sense.
I dragged up a hand from where I found it limp beneath me. I glided it across my leg, smearing it in my blood until it thickly coated my palm. And then I thought about the map that had revealed itself across my skin like a brand, how it had pulsed with the very color of my blood. This blood.
My thoughts muddled more, piling on top of each other.
A lone one distilled from the morass…
Beyond the frenzied, crazed cries of the beasts, I singled out the one thought and clamped on to it. Through my moans of pain that I only now noticed, I held on to it.
Map .
The map.
Suddenly, it was all there was.
My entire arm trembled as I lifted my bloody palm, blood sliding down the arm. I aimed to bring my hand to my heart, to the kiss of death and Rush’s palmprint, but I missed.
It fumbled onto my clavicle, which I found broken. A flash of agony exploded behind my eyes even as I felt a tug deep within my torso, behind my heart. It dragged me, limp and moaning, away from this hell .
Without ceremony, without warning, it—whatever it was—dumped me onto cold, hard dirt. It was dank, dark, and wet. All that light and noise was gone.
Even so, I couldn’t open my eyes. Couldn’t move a muscle.
Whatever had happened, it was too late. Death had already claimed me.